10 Very Scary Movies for Halloween pt.1

This is not a complete list. Just some personal faves.

With 7 days to Halloween and the launch of my novel, “The strange crimes of Beatrice Clover” the first in a new series of psychological thrillers, I decided to list my 7 favorite movies for Halloween.

For me true terror begins with a slow boil until it boils over, the pots and pans catch fire, then the curtains and the couch, until finally the whole house is an inferno.

That’s how I like horror. Starts with a small burn and ends in an all-consuming blaze. I'm not a big fan of gross-out horror. I’m also not a fan of horror-comedies. Though I think that almost every great horror film has a streak of dark humor to it. Generally speaking though, I like my horror movies (certainly the ones that make this list) to be scary and you know, horrifying. So then, onto the list…

1. The Silence of the Lambs

You’ve got to hand it to The Silence of the Lambs. It’s not just a terrifying movie—it’s a terrifying book. And both are masterpieces in their own right. The movie is especially noteworthy because it pulled off a rare feat: it’s one of only a few films to win the “Big Five” Oscars—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The book, of course, is Thomas Harris’s best work. Hannibal Lecter first appeared in Red Dragon, which is a solid introduction, but it wasn’t until Silence of the Lambs that Harris made the brilliant move to bring Lecter to the forefront. That decision turned the character into an icon. Like his chilling escape from his cell, the move unleashed “Hannibal the Cannibal” to ascend into the pantheon of monsters, right up there with Dracula.

Stephen King compared the good doctor in a Sunday NY Times review of Harris's long-awaited sequel novel, “Hannibal” (later turned into a movie of the same name).

“If Hannibal Lecter isn’t a Count Dracula for the computer-and-cell-phone age, then we don’t have one … No character in popular fiction is as fragile as the monster, or so prone to losing his pants in his later appearances. Freddy Krueger is authentically terrifying when he first flashes his scalpel fingernails in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but by the third installment of the series he has become a pal and by the sixth he has become a joke. In 11 years Hannibal Lecter’s notoriety has grown rather than lessened, and he is no joke…”

-Stephen King

Anthony Hopkins turn as Hannibal Lecter is so iconic that despite all the great roles played since then and he's played so many there's little doubt that that will be the first one mentioned in his obituary.

Notable Mentions: I’ll never forget that around the fourth season of “Breaking Bad” Bryan Cranston who played “Walter White” got a personal letter from Sir Anthony Hopkins. I don't remember the entirety of the letter or its exact wording but I remember one part that Brian read to me that I believe was the opening to the letter. I'm paraphrasing of course but it went something like this.

“Dear Mr. Cranston I've just finished your show Breaking Bad. I thought that I knew how to act. But your remarkable performance as “Walter White” has shown me what true acting is.”

That was the basic gist.

Talk about a compliment.

When a master thespian like Anthony Hopkins writes to tell you that your work in a particular role has made him rethink his idea of what true acting is, well, that's about as high compliment as you can get

2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I'm including this one because it is both abjectly terrifying and it contrasts nicely with The Silence of the Lambs proving that terror can be achieved in many ways in different movies. And yet both are terrifying for similar reasons. Perhaps more than any other genre, money is less a factor in making something that is both scary and good. exists in many respects in many aspects on a different out of the spectrum from that movie.

The first similarity is that both movies managed to create iconic characters of her. Hannibal the cannibal Lecter and leather face or about as well known as you can get in the pantheon of horror movies.

Next, whereas The Silence of the Lambs was made by a major motion picture studio with an experienced and incredibly talented director, writer, cinematographer, not to mention two of the best actors of all time in Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had exactly zero stars, a first time director, is filmed in an almost documentary/cinema verité style (which is probably giving it too much intentional credit), and was shot on a shoestring budget and schedule.

Yet, its limitations are what in the end, contributed to its success. The visceral feeling of docu-style filmmaking that director Tobe Hooper shot is one of the things that makes the movie so scary. It makes you feel like this is really happening. Take the scene at the dining table with the Sawyer family when the decrepit grandfather is attempting to hit “Sally” on her head with the hammer as she is held over a bucket that is to be used to catch the blood. The whole sequence is insanity-inducing.

However, all the jump scares and gore aside, the reason for its popularity and enduring success is that is is at its heart a good story. The movie feels like a modern cinematic fable (but of the Grimm variety, not Aesop). Over the hills and through sticks of Texas off to Grandma’s house a bunch of teens go (they even have goodies in a basket in the form of beer and pot)… When they run into the big bad wolf (think it’s an accident Leatherface’s family were butchers?) Only instead of razor sharp teeth, this big bad wolf has a razor sharp chainsaw.

Intentional or not, it is the adherence to a classic story that, in part, accounts for Leatherface’s place in the annals of horror cinema among the great movie monsters . Right up there with Count Dracula and Dr. Hannibal Lectre.

Notable mention: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which I saw when I was 15 was so scary to me that it derailed my plans to make out with a girl while watching a scary movie. That never happened because from the opening scene I was too frozen with terror to make any move on the young lady.

3. A Nightmare Elm Street.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street is iconic not just because it was Wes Craven’s debut, but because it launched a franchise that essentially saved New Line Cinema. The studio was struggling, and Freddy Krueger was their Hail Mary. Later on, New Line would pull off the same magic trick with The Lord of the Rings. But back in the 80s, it was all about that burned man in the red and green sweater, armed with razor-sharp fingers and hell-bent on revenge against the parents who burned him alive. That’s horror.

Freddy Krueger isn’t just any movie monster; he’s mythological. If you need proof, just watch the scene where Nancy falls asleep in school after her friend Tina is murdered. That dream sequence alone is worth the price of admission. The movie even weaves in a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Now, how many slasher flicks can say that?

“Were it not that I have bad dreams.”

If that’s not a high-minded ambition for a horror movie, I don’t know what is. After the 1970s, most of the monsters we saw on screen were serial killers. From the sniper in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets to the babysitters hunted by Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, the horror genre became dominated by slashers. Sure, Jason comes back from the dead, but that’s more of a gimmick.

Freddy Krueger was different. He was the son of a thousand maniacs, born into hell on earth and reigning over it in the dream world he twisted into our worst nightmares. There was no escaping Freddy, because how do you outrun sleep? Having to face your nightmares was the nightmare.

In the first few Nightmare on Elm Street movies, Freddy made that fear real, and genuinely terrifying. Yes, as the franchise wore on, it leaned more and more into comedy, with Freddy becoming a parody of himself. By the time they were throwing in Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold as cameos, Freddy had become more of a pop culture punchline than a threat (which, honestly, is scary in its own right).

Fun fact: The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise also launched the careers of a couple of household names—Johnny Depp in part one and Patricia Arquette in part three.

4. Se7en

Speaking of movie star leading men who appear in my favorite scary movies for Halloween we turn now to Brad Pitt and his turn in David Fincher's “Seven”. This descent into detective noir makes the list for its introduction of “John Doe” the highly literate, religiously-inspired serial killer, in an uncredited part played by Kevin Spacey, who frankly, was the embodiment of sick and creepy.

The movie, if not a groundbreaking movie, then is an A+ student of the genre that executed its story perfectly both on the page and on the screen. Seven might be a perfect movie and one that early on hunter at the brilliance of David Fincher when it came to his precision and the composition of shots and the ability to elicit emotion not to mention the precision with which he approaches his filmmaking.

Se7en, like Silence of the Lambs benefits from having big stars like Brad Pitt in Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow, and makes great use of them by lulling audiences into a false sense of a happy ending. After all, that’s Brad and Gwinnie (the Hollywood couple most likely to couple back then). Nothing bad will happen to them!

Then of course there is what has to be one of the great uncredited rolls in movie history, Kevin Spacey shows up as “John Doe.”

In some ways the success of a movie can be marked by its ability to become part of the lexicon or so a part of pop culture trivia that It's most intense moments get water down. I'm thinking of the “fava beans with a nice Chianti line” in “Silence,” or in the case of “Se7en” Brad Pitt screaming “What’s in the box?!” in the movie’s climactic scene. It might seem funny now. But If you saw Se7en in the movie theater, which I was fortunate enough to do, you know no one was laughing the first time they saw it. We were all too terrified.

What makes Seven such a classic is its ending. It delivers on all its promises. Hell, it far exceeds them. From the moment that Kevin Spacey shows up in the police precinct confesses to his crimes to Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman and set in motion the final two murders it was impossible not to sit in the theater too afraid to move, wondering what it was he had in store. We all wanted to know what was in the box and when we found out it shocked us.

Notable mentions: the scene with the drug addled pedophile in bed who you think is dead — then he coughs — one of the biggest audience jump scares I've ever seen in a movie theater

Johnson McGinley as a SWAT officer. I'm not sure it gets much better than that.

5. The Shining

An exploration through the supernatural of the slow slide into insanity and the depth and the properties of alcoholism. Culminating in a father's attempt to murder his wife and son. Famously directed by Stanley Kubrick from the Stephen King novel and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall.

The Shining is a suspenseful terrifying movie that plums the Stephen King novel for its best moments and finds the pathos in each of the characters and then twist the two together so that we have is a classic haunted house story that is in inreality much more of a character study which is what makes it such a truly frightening movie. Particularly once Nicholson goes full-on crazy “Jack” and the audience realizes, much like Shelley Duvall’s “Wendy,” there's no where to run from him.

Among the classic scenes, Nicholson’s trip to the empty dry bar only to find it filled with guests and his favorite bartender, “Lloyd” who pours Nicholson’s “Jack” a drink of the hair of the dog that bit him. This surreal scene keeps escalating. As Jack takes his drink and dances through the ballroom he is bumped into by a waiter who takes him to the restroom (an eye splitting orange and white lavatory). The waiter introduces himself as “Grady” Nicholson recognizes the name. “Grady, eh? The former caretaker here?'“ Grady, the demonic spirit of the hotel, tells Nicholson that he needs to “correct his children.” The way Grady corrected his children…with an ax. Brrrrr….

Chilling.

Notable mentions:

The production design of the movie is quite extraordinary. from the hedge maze which was partially built by the production team, to the odd placement of doors and windows on sets, all of which is meant to subliminally unsettle the audience

Kubrick was no great fan of the Stephen King novel, and Stephen King famously hates the Kubrick movie.